The present invention relates to the field of multimedia communications and, more particularly, to dynamically adjusting user-received communications for a real-time multimedia communications event.
Real-time multimedia communications events (e.g., video conferences, online collaboration sessions, instant messaging, etc.) have become a key tool for organizations whose workforce is geographically separated. Due to the various constraints on the networks being used to provide the real-time multimedia communication, many real-time multimedia communications systems include functionality that automatically adjust the quality of the communications provided to end-users. Additionally, some real-time multimedia communications systems allow a system administrator to define a maximum number or threshold of participants that are provided with communication types that are more resource consuming like video.
For example, if the organization's local area network (LAN) is under heavy load, the real-time multimedia communications systems may reduce the quality of the video portion or stream provided to the participants of a video conference. In the case where the threshold for video participants has been reached, the next user to join the video conference will be provided with only the audio portion.
While these efforts address resource issues from the network perspective, the creator of the real-time multimedia communications event has no control as to how the real-time multimedia communications systems will appropriate the limited number of higher resource-consuming connections. As such, the later a participant joins the real-time multimedia communications event, the more likely it is that the participant will not receive a higher resource-consuming connection like video.
In a conventional real-time multimedia communications system, attempting to provide a late participant with a full resource connection to the real-time multimedia communications event would require existing participants to leave until the late participant has the desired connection and then rejoin. After this effort, it is still possible that the other participants do not have the type of connections that the event creator desires. This manual process of adjustment consumes the time allowed for the real-time multimedia communications event as well as increases user frustrations.